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Children finding it hard to sleep on Christmas Eve can check not only if Santa's on his way but also his ETA, thanks to the air defense specialists at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). This ScienCentral News video has more.
Santa's Flight Path
At the North American Aerospace Defense Command's (NORAD) high-security stronghold deep inside Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, air defense specialists have tracked Santa Claus's annual around-the-world flight for the past 50 years. They say it's all part of NORAD's mission of protecting North America's security by constantly monitoring the skies for any suspicious aircraft or activity.
"The man is in the air, he's got nine reindeer, he's got this massive sleigh full of toys, he's got incredible speeds and he's going at an unusual pattern around the world," says Major Douglas Martin, Chief of Santa Tracking Operations at NORAD.
It all started 50 years ago, when a Colorado department store put an ad in the paper for a Santa hotline for kids—but the phone number in the ad mistakenly turned out to be the operations hotline for Continental Air Defense, NORAD's predecessor. The military personnel, receiving lots of phone calls for Santa that Christmas eve, quickly realized that while they couldn't speak for Santa, they could check their radar scopes to see if they could spot him heading south from the north pole—and they saw him. Since then it's been an annual tradition. Today, NORAD uses four high-tech systems to track Santa —radar, Santa Cams, jet fighter aircraft, and a network of spy satellites that lock onto the signal from Rudolph's nose.
While all of NORAD's capabilities have grown more sophisticated over the decades, the biggest advance for children has been the deployment of Santa Cams. "The Santa Cam is an omni-directional high-speed digital camera that's able to pick up incredible visuals of Santa as he goes into different countries," says Martin. "That improvement just changed the whole tracking system completely because now kids go on the website and actually see video of Santa…as we're tracking him, as he's going around the world."
While NORAD has estimated Santa's speed at anywhere from mach 600—which is 600 times the speed of sound, or 300 times faster than NORAD's fighter jet— to nearly the speed of light, he actually slows down enough for NORAD fighters and Santa Cams to see him. That's because Santa has come to rely on NORAD to help parents get their children to bed, otherwise Santa has to backtrack to homes where the kids were still awake on his first pass. "Children get very excited on Christmas Eve, and naturally even when mom and dad say, 'Hey, c'mon kids, it's time to go to bed, Santa's on his way,' sometimes they're just too excited," Martin says. "It's very important [that] someone from NORAD's able to say to the kids…'It's true, he's on his way, he's in this particular state right now, he's in this particular province or this particular country, and my gosh, it's going to be so soon, he's going to be here, right at your own city or town or home, you want to get to bed as soon as possible.'"
Martin says his belief in Santa has wavered through the years, but he's definitely on board now. "I went through a lot of phases and then all of a sudden I'm in my 40s, and my gosh, I'm the chief of Santa tracking operations, I actually track Santa," he says. "And I don't track him alone, I track him with this enormous group of people…we know he's real. Why? Because we see him."
NORAD recently released declassified images it has captured of Santa dating back to the 1950s that reveal just how little he's changed.
To check his progress, kids can call toll-free, 1-877-HI-NORAD, or click here.
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